Systems have been developed where the contents of received physical mail are scanned and the scanned version of the contents sent electronically to the recipient. When scanning physical mailpieces in order to send a digitized version of the envelope and its contents to the recipient as an alternative to receiving paper, it is necessary to open the envelope and prepare the contents for scanning. This step is either manual or automated. However it is done, it adds time and money to the operation. The results sent to the recipient may potentially impair the user experience with the mailpiece due to reduced visual quality from digitization when scanning. This can be due to degraded image quality of the original, skewing of the scanned materials, physical affordances of paper that do not readily transfer during scanning and the like.
Various systems are known where a printed object is scanned to establish an internet address corresponding to that object such as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,311,214 B1 for LINKING OF COMPUTERS BASED ON OPTICAL SENSING OF DIGITAL DATA issued Oct. 30, 2001 and in U.S. Pat. No. 6,542,927 B2 LINKING OF COMPUTERS BASED ON STENOGRAPHICALLY EMBEDDED DIGITAL DATA issued Apr. 1, 2003. These systems involve a printed object, such as an item of postal mail, a book, printed advertising, a business card, product packaging, etc., that is stenographically encoded with plural-bit data.
As disclosed in the '214 and the '927 patents, when such an object is presented to an optical sensor, the plural-bit data is decoded and used to establish a link to an internet address corresponding to that object. An object or paper product contains digital information and is scanned so that the digital information can be quickly read and acted upon by an appropriately configured device, computer or appliance. The digital information may be hidden on the objects. These objects can be marked with the digital information, using any of the broad ranges of printing and processing techniques which are available on the market and which are widely described in the open literature and patent literature surrounding digital watermarking.
One application proposed in the '927 patent involves postal mail information where it is suggested that many contexts arise in which data to be presented to a consumer is valuable only if timely and that the postal service mail is ill-suited for some such information due to the latency between printing a document, and its ultimate delivery to a recipient; and also that principles of the '927 patent system patent (referred to as a “Bedoop” system) allow the recipient to take a postal object that was printed well before delivery, and use it on receipt (i.e., when presented to a '927 type system) to receive up-to-the-minute information. In this and other embodiments, the '927 patent system, it is asserted that data can also uniquely identify the addressee/recipient/user, so the web site can present data customized to that user. Nevertheless, these systems are not flexible in the ability of senders and recipients to utilize electronic and physical mail